this may be a stupid question but since my rep isn't all that high, I'd hate to risk 50 rep without knowing.

If I start a bounty on a question, do I lose the rep immediately even if the answer is incorrect? the tooltip on the "Start a Bounty" made me nervous about this

TheOneWhoPrograms is correct below...

How is a bounty awarded?

The bounty period lasts 7 days. Bounties must have a minimum duration of at least 1 day. After the bounty ends, there is a grace period of 24 hours to manually award the bounty. Simply click the bounty award icon next to each answer to permanently award your bounty to the answerer. (You cannot award a bounty to your own answer.)

If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.

If the bounty was started by the question owner, and the question owner accepts an answer posted during the bounty period, and the bounty expires without an explicit award then we assume the bounty owner liked the answer they accepted and award it the full bounty amount at the time of bounty expiration.

As a special bonus, any reputation you earn from being awarded a bounty is exempt from the daily reputation cap.